Many people enjoy free web-based applications that send mail, delivers news, etc. However, the drawback of these programs is that the user must be online. You can’t use these programs once you go offline. Now users have the opportunity to enjoy some free office productivity tools such as Word and Excel from Google. Google is developing some of its free web-based applications such as Gmail, Docs and Spreadsheets that can continue to be used even though the user has gone offline. If this is successful, Google will pose a very strong challenge to Microsoft!
The launching of Google Gears (BETA) by Google recently has raised some concern to its rival. Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using JavaScript. Programmers can use these tools to enhance their own web-based programs for offline use. Google Gears provides three key features:
• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

The introduction of productivity applications such as Google Gears by Google will definitely benefit many computer users in terms of cost. Having said that, many analysts are doubtful about these products. They are of the opinion that unlike Microsoft’s competing software, these products lack the support or functions that most businesses need.